Grapevine: Blonde or brunette?

When you think back to the mid-2000s, big bold reds still ruled the day.

Alcohol levels in many a Shiraz or Grenache from South Australia would regularly clock in at more than 15 per cent and be lavished with new, small format oak. To move against the prevailing market from within the Barossa Valley – one of the poster child regions for these wines – would certainly have been a bold decision at the time. In hindsight it was a smart decision to make, though, as tastes have significantly shifted since then towards lighter bodied wines with moderate alcohols and minimal oak influence. The small group of producers who made this move early, are now being rewarded handsomely as the modern icons of the region.
Alex Head was one such pioneer, having no doubt identified the potential opportunity from working in many facets of the wine industry from retail to wholesale and even auctions all the way to winery work for notable wineries including Torbreck and Tyrell’s. He set about establishing his own label in 2006, Head.
With the wines of the Rhone Valley and in particular the Northern Rhone as his guiding light to the style he wanted to make, it was certainly a departure from the status quo, picking a little earlier and thus producing wines with moderate alcohol levels, making use of whole bunch fermentation and favouring large format seasoned oak changed the focal point from ripeness, richness, and power to the characters of the fruit and structure in each vineyard, to wines of balance and finesse that aim for more than sheer hedonism.
You may well think of Barossa Shiraz as a homogenous style, but it is a diverse viticultural area: there is the flat areas in the valley, the higher altitude areas to the east and west and many different soil profiles. These all produce different expressions that can be hard to drill down to if the wine in front of you is a blend across the whole valley and/or lavished with oak, and picked so late in the season that the subtle flavours are all but baked out of the wine. When you get producers like Spinifex, Ruggabellus, and Head who move to bottling wines based on these sub-regional differences and using their viticultural and winemaking decisions to highlight these unique differences, you can get a whole new, diverse picture of the region.
Alex’s two Shiraz based wines ‘Blonde’ and ‘Brunette’ are a nod to the famed slopes of Cote-Rotie in the Northern Rhone: Blonde being a sweeter fruited, plump and seductive while the Brunette is darker, brooding and savoury; they show off the Stonewell and Moppa sub-regions respectively. But when you’re as hands on and detail-oriented as Alex clearly is, there is a cost to that which results in brilliant, individual wines but that often sit a little outside the budgets for many wine drinkers. So it is a bit of a gift to have a little $20 Shiraz produced entirely from some excellent quality Barossa fruit that has seen that care and attention applied, but also tweaked ever so slightly to ensure the wine fits the bill for the price point – delicious, approachable and a snapshot of his winemaking style.
Plump juicy plum, berry and sweet earth along with a hint of liquorice and pepper on the finish with fine tannins that in comparison to the previous year feel more polished and give the wine a finesse that really caught our attention.